“If I were to kill Amygdala, how would I do it?” I mumbled to myself as I sat on a bench at the train station holding a newspaper and trying to look as inconspicuous as possible.

I read the headline in the newspaper.

Ban on personal magic. Report any cases to local authorities.

Yeah right. Just try to stop someone like Amygdala… Are there even any weapons non-mages can use?

I thought about this question for a bit. Military technology was pretty underdeveloped and what I had seen of it, which was almost nothing, struck me as very rudimentary. The kingdom was a pretty peaceful place because basic magic blueprints like clean water and fertile earth made it almost impossible to starve.

Of course, the peaceful part was about to change. Now that a bunch of kids was running around developing a new, very combat-focused, field of magic. Already now at the beginning stages of the 5% generation, Tyoto was basically broken into a bunch of warlord territories.

I sighed.

Where the hell are the Northern Gangs? And what will I even do when I spot them?

And just then, right on cue, I saw a group of young guys walk out of the station. They were obviously gang members. And they were all wearing black leather jackets and black boots.

So Psycho has already started standardizing and militarising.

I folded my newspaper and started following them from behind in the most non-suspicious manner I could.

The gang just loafed around and seemed to not head in any specific direction, but mostly walked around the main area and sometimes catcalled and got ignored by pretty girls.

Suddenly, I heard a beep from the leader of the group.

He picked up a weird black square thing I’d never seen before. It kind of looked like a mana battery.

“HQ is calling us,” I heard him say.

Is that some kind of communication device? Mental note: remember to ask Licia about that.

And so I followed them back to the train station, kept following them the entire way to their HQ.

The gang got off at Taito, which was the central part of north Tyoto.

I kept following them until they went into some kind of office building right in front of the station.

Guess I gotta stop here for today. I’ll come back another day and check things out. Don’t want to get caught.

It was starting to get dark and I was tired, so I got a burger and went back home to get some sleep. Before I got in bed, I thought: “I’ll need to get some money soon if I wanna keep taking Licia to those expensive places. But no way I’m going back to working in a kitchen. How can I use my magic to make money?” I thought this as I tried to fall asleep with my tinnitus keeping me awake. After an hour or so I finally managed to get a little sleep just from pure exhaustion.